Modern Library Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century

Sir Isaiah Berlin
1909-1997
found in The Proper Study of Mankind : An Anthology of Essays by Isaiah Berlin

The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one
big thing
-Archilochus,
8th century BC

Never have the readers of the New York Times been more humbled and mystified
than the November day in 1997 when the paper ran a front page obituary
for the Latvian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin. You could
hear the collective gasp and feel the pull of the intake of breath as thousands
of folks who pride themselves on being "in the know" turned to one another
and asked, across a table laid with grapefruit halves and bran cereal,,
"Was I supposed to know who Isaiah Berlin was? I've never heard of
him." The answer is that there was no real reason most of us would
have heard of him, though we'd likely read a couple of his book reviews.
He was after all a philosopher who never produced a magnum opus summarizing
his worldview. His reputation really rested on a couple of amusing
anecdotes, one oft-cited essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, and on
his talents as a conversationalist, which would obviously only have been
known to an elite few. Oddly enough, he has experienced a significant
revival of interest since his death, but he is basically still just known
for this essay.

If, like me, you finally forced yourself to read War and Peace
and were simply mystified by several of the historic and battle scenes,
this essay is a godsend. Though many critics, and would would assume
almost all readers, have tended to just ignore these sections of the book,
Berlin examines them in light of Tolstoy's philosophy of history and makes
a compelling case that Tolstoy intended the action of these scenes to be
confusing. As Berlin uses the fox and hedgehog analogy, a hedgehog
is an author who has a unified vision which he follows in his writing ("...a
single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that
they are and say has significance...") , a fox has no central vision nor
organizing principle; his writings are varied, even contradictory.
Berlin argues that Tolstoy was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog, that
he longed for a central idea to organize around, but so distrusted the
capacity of human reason to discern such an idea, that he ended up knocking
down what he saw as faulty ideas, without ever settling on one of his own.

According to Berlin, in War and Peace, Tolstoy used the chaotic
swirl of events to dispel a "great illusion" : "that individuals can, by
the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events."
Or as he puts it later, Tolstoy perceived a "central tragedy" of human
life :

...if only men would learn how little the cleverest
and most gifted among them can control, how
little they can know of all the multitude of factors
the orderly movement of which is the history of
the world...

This idea is strikingly similar to the argument that F. A. Hayek made
almost a century later in his great book The
Road to Serfdom, though Hayek made it in opposition to centralized
government planning. Tolstoy's earlier development of this theme
makes him a pivotal figure in the critique of reason and a much more significant
figure than I'd ever realized in the history of conservative thought.

I'd liked War and Peace more than I expected to when I first
read it--despite not grasping what he was about in these sections of the
book--and I'm quite anxious to reread it now in light of Berlin's really
enlightening analysis. I've no idea how to judge the rest of Berlin's
work or how he ranks as a philosopher, but you can't ask more of literary
criticism than that it explain murky bits, that it engender or rekindle
interest in an otherwise musty-seeming work, and that it take a potentially
dated book and make us realize that it is still relevant. This essay
succeeds on all those levels. In this instance at least, Isaiah Berlin
warrants his hefty reputation.

WAR AND PEACE:
-ESSAY: Birth, death, balls and battles: It has no clear beginning, middle or end, but the first translation of War and Peace for 50 years reaffirms its greatness. Tolstoy brilliantly interweaves the historical and the personal (Orlando Figes, 8/27/05, Times of London)